The Essenes, the Scrolls, and the Dead Sea

The Essenes, the Scrolls, and the Dead Sea

The Dead Sea Scrolls, the first three of which came to light in 1947,
were the most momentous manuscript discovery of the past hundred
years. Almost from the beginning, controversy has swirled around them:
who wrote the Scrolls; who carefully preserved them in jars in a
series of caves at the northwestern corner of the Dead Sea; what can
they tell us about the origins of Christianity and the formation of
post-biblical Judaism; and, beyond these substantive matters, which
scholars have the right to study and publish them. Over the years, the
Scrolls have triggered two bizarre court cases, one in Jerusalem and
the other in New York, involving contentious scholars; a
sensationalist book claiming that publication of the texts was long
blocked by the Vatican because it would reveal material that
challenged the legitimacy of the Church; clandestine exchanges between
shady dealers in antiquities and well-financed Scrolls-seekers; a
series of proposals, of varying implausibility, about the nature of
the Dead Sea community at Qumran; scandal-mongering news reports about
two different scholars, one a mentally unstable alcoholic, the other
pushing the fantastic notion that the Scrolls were associated with the
purported beginnings of Christianity in the use of hallucinogenic
mushrooms.